If your system was not setup using the guide from till, then I would suggest that you look at the following sections to ensure that you have the proper software installed to make this guide work for you:

Section 6 - Install Some Software

Section 11 - Apache2 With PHP

Update: I have been contacted and informed that the version of Net-SNMP being installed by YUM may not be working properly, so I have updated my guide. Now, both RRDTool and Net-SNMP will be installed from source.

Update: Updated to correct some issues with directory permissions, place the cron job under the cactiusers cron entry and also to eliminate an issue that some people reported when trying to compile RRDtool.

1 Download Cacti Source

As of this guide, the most recent version of Cacti is cacti-0.8.6j, so this is the one that we will work with. I maintain a directory for files that I download to my system called “downloads”. You may of course use whatever directory you see fit, but for the beginner, let's create the directory and download Cacti.

2 Download the Plug-in Architecture

Again, we will be working in the ‘downloads’ directory, which you should still be in. The current version of the Plug-in Architecture is v1.1.

wget http://cactiusers.org/downloads/cacti-plugin-arch.tar.gz

3 Install Some Necessary Software

Before we begin building Cacti, we will need to install some software to meet dependencies.First, let’s add the Dag Wieers repository which is necessary for some of the software. This assumes that you are installing Cacti on CentOS 4.4. If you are using a different version, please check this page for the proper link to use after the ‘rpm –Uvh’ command.